Morning Brief: Doubling down and chipping away

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A good Tuesday morning to you.

No, that’s not the sound of your neighbour chipping their car out of its icy cocoon you’re hearing… It’s the chipping away of any legal relief President Donald Trump had hoped for in the wake of the FBI seizing his private documents from his lawyer’s office last week. More on that below.

While PM Justin Trudeau was making the rounds in Paris yesterday, his MPs were back at work in Ottawa, holding a hastily convened emergency debate into what to do about the Kinder Morgan pipeline. Given that the governing Liberals and opposition Conservatives are each one-upping the other on rhetoric that the pipeline absolutely, positively, has to get built, it didn’t make for scintillating watching. “The stakes are high and we are determined,” said Natural Resources Minister Jim Carr. “We will not leave Canadian resources without access to markets.” Uh huh? Better tell that to the wheat farmers.

Meanwhile, Conservative MP Shannon Stubbs, who had called for the emergency debate, said “Energy is Canada’s number-one private sector in the economy [Fact check: not really, but it sounds good. Actually, all mining, quarrying and oil or gas extraction together make up the #3 sector, at 8.1 per cent of the economy in 2016]. It’s Canada’s second-largest export [actually, here it is #1]. The Liberals have got to champion Canadian energy, Canadian innovation and Canadian jobs.”

Green Party Leader Elizabeth May talks with media in Ottawa on Monday, April 16, 2018. iPolitics/Matthew Usherwood

For her part, Green Party leader Elizabeth May said the whole ‘crisis’ talk is overblown and that U.S.-giant Kinder Morgan is pulling a fast one on the Canadian public. “Kinder Morgan has executed an extremely effective piece of blackmail and, to my astonishment, otherwise sensible people seem to be running in a mood of mass hysteria,” May said. “I don’t understand it. Calm down. Look at the evidence.”

Daniel Jean, National Security and Intelligence Advisor to the Prime Minister waits to appear before a standing committee on Public Safety and National Security in Ottawa on Monday, April 16, 2018. iPolitics/Matthew Usherwood

Daniel Jean, the embattled national security advisor to the PM, testified before a House committee yesterday that he never accused the Indian government of allowing “rogue elements” to undermine Trudeau’s ill-fated trip in February. “I never raised a conspiracy theory… It certainly wasn’t people representing the government of India, these are unknown rogue elements that coordinated these false allegations to create problems between Canada and India,” Jean said. That said, Jean didn’t explain why it took him two months to clarify the ‘misunderstanding’ and stopped short of apologizing to the Government of India, something the Indian foreign ministry has been demanding.

HERE AND THERE

PM Justin Trudeau addresses the French National Assembly; Departs for London this evening.

The Parliamentary Budget Officer unveils its report into “Costing a National Guaranteed Basic Income Using the Ontario Basic Income Model”;

Kelly Craft, U.S. Ambassador to Canada, offers a keynote address to the Montreal Council on Foreign Relations;

Statistics Canada releases February results for the monthly survey of manufacturing and Canada’s international securities transactions;

Privacy commissioner Daniel Therrien is back at the Commons privacy and ethics committee to discuss Cambridge Analytica and Facebook;

Amnesty International Canada secretary general Alex Neve appears at Commons foreign affairs committee on the human rights situation in Turkey;

Canada 2020 hosts a debate this evening on “Does the State Have Any Business in the Newsrooms of the Nation?” National Post columnist, Andrew Coyne, and Bob Cox, publisher Winnipeg Free Press, debate the issue, moderated by Carleton University’s Susan Harada.

Back to that chip-chip-chipping sound. A federal judge in Manhattan dashed President Trump’s hopes of getting a first look at the documents seized from his lawyer, Michael Cohen, when the FBI raided Cohen’s home, office and hotel room last week.

That wasn’t the only interesting piece of news emerging from the Cohen raid yesterday. We also learned that Trump’s ride or die supporter, Sean Hannity, was also a client of Cohen. The revelation came as Cohen told the court yesterday that he had worked for 10 clients, seven of whom he served by providing “strategic advice and business consulting,” and the other three being Trump, Republican fund-raiser Elliott Broidy and a third person who went unnamed, but was later revealed to be Hannity.

The Fox host took to Twitter to deny ever having hired Cohen for legal services.

Michael Cohen has never represented me in any matter. I never retained him, received an invoice, or paid legal fees. I have occasionally had brief discussions with him about legal questions about which I wanted his input and perspective.

Still with Trump — when are we not these days? — the president scrapped a new round of sanctions that were meant to be imposed on Russia yesterday. The move directly contradicted Ambassador Nikki Haley’s announcement Sunday that companies found to be assisting Syria’s chemical weapons program would be facing fresh sanctions.

The U.S. and U.K. made a joint announcement yesterday warning that Russia is using compromised computer-network equipment to attack U.S. and British companies and government agencies. The New York Times reports that the first-of-its-kind joint warning was made in an effort to “deter future attacks by calling attention to existing vulnerabilities.”